Obama Mangles Emerson

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Over the weekend, as he berated the Israeli government for its opposition to the proposed Iranian nuclear deal, President Obama attempted to strike a literary note. Condemning Jerusalem’s supposed flip-flopping on the merits of the deal, the president sarcastically said, “you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of narrow minds.”

President Obama’s copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations must be missing a page: He mangled the extremely well known Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That he botched a quote is not, in and of itself, a huge deal: we all slip up from time to time. Besides, President Obama’s disdain for art and literature is well chronicled.

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